Change, driven by innovation, never stops with engineers. But, it is so constant, that you sometimes have to step back to really appreciate how far it has taken us. This photo contrasts the driving experience in 1912 with the self-driving, robotic, rolling scientific lab being operated 50M- 250M miles away on Mars. The amazing part is that this change has occurred within a single (long) lifetime. There are over 300,000 people in the world who are old enough to have seen this change. The rate of change in some other industries has been even more shocking.

We should all appreciate how far engineering has taken us.....and how much farther we will go.

But, recently, the non-military, non-police uses have started to grow as well. This is a great example of not only unmanned aerial vehicles, but also swarm behavior and the analytics to leverage all the data. It is amazing to see that a swarm of drones were able to map the Matterhorn in 3D in tremendous detail (within 4 inches!). In a world where we can get a satellite picture of almost any home in the world, this level of 3D mapping will bring new models and applications of real world mapping.

It is clear that our future as a species is tied to advances in Medical Devices as means to improve our quality of life, to extend our lives, and to help improve the speed, cost and quality of medical care along the way. One recent breakthrough in this area is a new class of embedded electronics which can be powered by our own bodies. This chip, developed by MIT, uses naturally occurring ions in a mammal's inner ear to power the device. This is amazing and can now be done in a way which does not impair hearing. The size of this device is also really impressive.

The applications of embedded medical devices will only increase over time. And, they will have increasing intelligence and connectivity. I know there are a lot of scary scifi scenarios of how this could be abused, but the real world uses seem endless.

I thought this comic might be a good way to end the week. It shows how fast technology continues to change. We no longer have generation gaps when technologies evolve as quickly as they do, we have gaps of only a few years. For example, it is hard to believe but before June 29, 2007 when the iPhone was announced, there was nothing on the market that you would recognize today as a smartphone. Recent articles suggest that this was the day that Google started over with Android to focus on the touch interface. Effectively, that date created a step function in mobile platforms and the rate of change and improvements in mobile continues to accelerate. Staying current on technology is a challenge we all must embrace.

We all know that an Engineers work is never done. If you had to help friends and family fix their computers and networks and phones this holiday season, you know that already. But, what is changing in the market is an increased consumer expectation that products will continue to improve even after you buy them. We are entering the Age of the Upgrade.http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/31/5261042/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-upgrade

This article only touches what this means for us. It is common now when you turn on your camera, computer, phone, streaming TV box, and even turn on your car, that you are told that there is an upgrade available. This is a moment of joy for some users who are waiting for cool new features, and a moment of dread for some as they know the bad things that can happen during a failed upgrade. But this experience is here to stay, and it is expaning in it's reach as more devices become connected.

This past week, Ford announced software upgrades for 3.4M cars. This is to address frustrations among their users and to continue to expand the capabilities of their cars.

This week at CES, Google, GM, Honda, and Audi announced the Open Auto Alliance This will bring a new level of consumer 'smartphone-like' capabilities to cars using Android.

This week, Samsung is announcing an open platform for smart appliances, LG is announcing the ability to send text messages to your appliances, and smart TVs, smart watches and streaming devices continue to proliferate.

It will be a huge challenge for companies to make the never ending upgrade cycle painless and to be seen positively by users.

But, this smart 'onesie' seems to go farther into taking smart and connected into the non-appliance world. There are dozens of health and activity monitors at CES this year from every possible supplier, but most people are not active enough to be worth tracking. But, tracking the health of babies is a noble goal and one that should appeal to a broad set of parents. I love that the baby is giving it a thumbs up in the picture!

With all the recent news and Consumer Electronics Show announcements of countless smart, connected devices, appliances, and vehicles, you would think the Internet of Things is ready for prime time. But, when you look under the covers, you will see that we are really only at the beginning of this journey, and there are numerous challenges and pitfalls for companies who are blazing the way.

Connectivity magnifies security risks. So, as every day devices gain intelligence and connectivity, the security challenges for manufacturers and consumers only grows. The security firm, Proofpoint, identified a new form of cyberattack that causes smart devices (TV's and appliances) to send out malicious emails. Apparently over 750,000 emails were sent from 100,000 devices. While this may have only slowed down your devices and clogged network traffic, the implications are clear. Unprotected or poorly designed devices will expose your life to hackers and criminals. This is scarier when you consider the cameras and monitoring devices that will be used in the coming years in our living rooms and bedrooms.

Designing and testing for security for the Internet of Things will need to mature significantly, and quickly, to protect us.

This week marked the passing of a true engineering role model, The Professor, played by Russell Johnson on Gilligan's Island. He was 89 years old and remained adored by fans throughout his career. For anyone watching TV in the 1970's, it would have been hard to not know the amazing character he portrayed. The Professor could make a lie detector, a battery charger, a helium balloon, a geiger counter, a sewing machine, and a telegraph. He did all of this with little more than bamboo, coconuts, and some spare parts lying around the island.

While these inventions may not have gotten them off the island, he never stopped trying. He showed a relentless level of innovation and continuous engineering! The Professor will be missed.

This video report from 1981 explores the potential and the reality of distributing news content over the internet long before anyone used a browser. It is easy to laugh when you look at the text based interface (before the term UI had any meaning), when you imagine the performance of using an acoustic coupling modem, and when you consider the cost of distributing a single newspaper digitally ($10!). It was a crude demonstration of how we would interact with the world once we are all networked.

If you fast forward to today, you can see similarly crude steps towards the Internet of Things. There are competing standards (z-wave, zigbee, etc), there are custom made components (Rasberry Pi, Ninjablocks, etc), performance and security is unproven, and the costs remain high ($250 for a thermostat). But, it is the promise that has everyone's attention. And, like the internet before it, fortunes will be made as companies solve the issues and create new business models.

This is the very first Porsche, made in 1898, 116 years ago. It was made by Ferdinand Porsche when he was 22 years old. It was the first car he even built. And, it was an electric car. It had a range of 50 miles and even won a race in 1899, driven by Porsche himself for 24 miles, with 4 people on board. This was a time of passionate engineering and vision, when everything seemed possible. I am sure he never imagined today's hybrid supercars like the Porsche 918, but we would never have them if it were not for innovators like this.

We like to imagine that everything we can buy today in a car dealership or in the home theater department came from massive R&D labs filled with engineers and scientists in white cleansuits, working with the most advanced technologies in the world. But, this really only happens after new technologies have time to mature and gain adoption. The origins of these technologies are often a lot less glamorous and polished than that. This kind of innovation has been driven over the years by 'makers' who toil away and tinker with unproven technologies to create new things. So, those flashy 2014 cars and home theater systems of today really started out as hand crafted, one of kind devices like these.

This kind of innovation comes from the passion and drive of makers who tinker in their garage or lab to see what is possible. Early makers, like the engineers in Edison's Menlo Park labs, created the foundations of entire industries. So, watching the efforts of makers can be a tremendous way to see the future of engineering.

Today, makers are everywhere. It is a great time to be an engineer. At events like Maker Faire, and on innovation incubators like Indiegogo, and Kickstarter , you will see a lot of passion around topics like 3D printing, Internet of Things, and virtual reality. They are using open standards, open source, and open platforms to create the next generation of products. Not everything they produce is useful or viable to sell, but if you watch these communities, you will get a strong sense of how things may look in the near future.

Products are becoming smarter and connected as part of the Internet of Things. This brings all kinds of new benefits for consumers, but it also brings new types of risks. Recently, there were hacks that caused 100,000 smart appliances to send unwanted email. This is annoying, but not yet dangerous. However, with smart devices providing home heating/cooling, smoke detection, and eventually autonomous driving, it is possible to cause real damage and danger if our smart devices are hacked.

At the upcoming Black Hat security conference in Singapore, some researchers will be showing how your car can be hacked for less than $20 of off the shelf parts. This hacking would allow someone to control the car's windows, lights, and even potentially the brakes remotely. This demonstration is intended to increase awareness of the importance of designing for security in the Internet of Things. It has taken 20 years to get to a level of security on our computers since we started connecting them to the internet. But, the risks here are greater and the level of security needed for connected things is certainly higher. This is a big opportunity for technology providers.

For every challenge, there is an engineering solution. Given this week's weather, I thought this might give some of us hope. This robotic snowplow can help you clear your driveway while sitting inside with your morning coffee. It is a bit expensive, but like the Roomba and other home robots, it shows the continued trend towards leveraging powerful engineering solutions to make our day to day lives easier.